Certain systems employ multiple devices to monitor conditions or to obtain data for a particular data class (e.g., a temperature value at each device). It often may prove desirable to determine the extreme value (i.e., maximum value or minimum value) of the data class for the multiple devices. In conventional systems whereby the devices are coupled together via a communications bus, a master device individually polls each device via the bus to determine its corresponding data value, and the extreme value from the multiple devices is then determined at the master device from the collection of the polled data values. Thus, N bus transactions typically are needed to individually poll N devices to determine the extreme data value of the corresponding data class of the N devices. The number of bus transactions thus needed to determine the extreme value can undesirably impede efficient operation of the system and increase power consumption. Accordingly, an improved technique for determining an extreme value for a data class represented by multiple devices of a system would be advantageous.